Achievement Systems Explained - Springer Link

Achievement Systems Explained Luca Galli and Piero Fraternali

Abstract In the chapter of Achievement Systems Explained, Galli and Fratenali provide an insight on achievements, their purposes and the way in which they have evolved, and illustrate a taxonomy of possible achievements along with a set of guidelines to be followed when developing them. Finally, Galli and Fratenali introduce a model that can be used to describe all the existing systems in order to try to put the basis for an open platform capable of integrating existing gaming communities. In today’s gaming world, the word ‘Achievements’, even if rooted in the gaming history, has become extremely popular. The spread of broadband connections and the introduction of multi-player interactions as core components of a videogame have brought to life a number of social platforms like Xbox Live!, Playstation Network, Steam and Kongregate, in which the players can track their progress along different game titles and compete among each others. Unfortunately, even if such platforms share similar features, the way in which they manage the aspects of user profiling and statistic tracking is different, leaving the architectural and development aspects of an achievement system tied to the implementation of each vendor. This chapter provides an insight on achievements, their purposes and the way in which they have evolved. A taxonomy of possible achievements is shown along with a set of guidelines to be followed when developing them. Finally, a model that can be used to describe all the existing systems is introduced in order to try to put the basis for an open platform capable of integrating existing gaming communities.

L. Galli (&) P. Fraternali Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

Y. Baek et al. (eds.), Trends and Applications of Serious Gaming and Social Media, Gaming Media and Social Effects, DOI: 10.1007/978-981-4560-26-9_3, Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2014

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L. Galli and P. Fraternali

1 Introduction Achievement is a word that has become mainstream in the gaming field in recent years. The term refers to a task that the player has to complete in order to obtain recognition for his effort and thus ‘unlock the achievement’. This notion is encountered in several heterogeneous systems under different synonyms, like achievements, badges, trophies, challenges and rewards. The growing popularity of the achievement concept is witnessed by the fact that it is difficult nowadays to find a game that has not some kind of reward or motivation mechanism; even in gamification (Deterding et al. 2011), that is the use of game design techniques and game mechanics to enhance non-game contexts, achievements cover a fundamental role and are employed as a way to retain customers or improve learning (Evans et al. 2011). Despite the growing popularity in practical gaming, the literature on game design has paid little attention to achievements, even if there is a general consensus that their proper design is core when driving gamers through their digital game experiences. The goal of this chapter is to provide some insight about achievement systems, along with design guidelines and architectural patterns that may ease the game development work.

2 Definitions In this section, we introduce the terminology that will be used throughout the chapter. A Player is the user of an entertainment system, may it be a game, a social community, or other similar platforms. An Achievement is a set of tasks, defined by a designer, for the player to fulfill so to achieve a milestone and track the progress in a system. A Badge is an artifact associated to the completion of an achievement and given to a player after its completion, or, in gaming terms, after ‘unlocking the achievement’. A Leaderboard is an ordered list of players based on the scores they have obtained in a specific game. The Player score is a numerical value that represents a measure of the skill of a player. When a player obtains a badge, he is often rewarded with an amount of points that depend on the difficulty of the task performed; the player score keeps track of all the points a player has received or redeemed for prizes in his gaming history. An Achievement System, also called Reward System, is a component of an entertainment platform used to offer, present, manage and share achievements, at a global scale and across multiple games or entertainment systems. It offers the

Achievement Systems Explained

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developers a set of functionalities and APIs to define gaming tasks that can be converted into achievements for their games; it also offers players a custom statistical information panel that summarizes their gaming history, also called player dossier, which records everything they have accomplished across the games they have played. In their work Hamari and Eranti (2011) also define achievements as ‘goals in an achievement/reward system (a different subsystem than the core game), the fulfillment of which is performed through activities and events in other systems (commonly in the core game)’. This definition emphasizes the separation between achievement systems and games, but omits aspects like the purpose of an achievement, the centrality of player’s role and the separation between the achievement definition and the reward associated to its completion.

3 Related Work The introduction of social gaming platforms has emerged just in the past few years and this phenomenon has gained significative importance only after the introduction of the proprietary Xbox Live! achievement system; therefore, the literature on the topic is still rather limited. The special issue of Game Studies covering Game Reward Systems (The International Journal of Computer Game Research 2012) has addressed the topic. In particular Jakobsson (2011) explains the role of the Microsoft’s Xbox Live! system, showing how it can be conceptualized as a massively multi-player game by itself. Moore (2011) discusses the importance of customization items in the game Team Fortress 2 as a motivational driving force for the players and discusses how customization has been coupled with the Steam’s achievement system. Medler (2011) illustrates how dossier systems promote player’s motivation and contextualize recorded gameplay, allowing players to analyze or share data about their performance. In Achievement Unlocked Curley (2010), one of the creators of the Xbox’s Gamer Profile, discusses the implementation of achievements inside the Xbox Live! Platform; the U.S. Patent (Bortnik et al. 2004) describes the foundations at the base of the Xbox Live! platform. Hamari et al. (2011) have studied a variety of popular achievement systems in order to identify the typical components of an achievement. In Montola et al. (2009) used a custom achievement system in order to enhance user experience in a photo sharing service.

4 Achievements in Gaming History After the increased interest derived from the introduction of an achievement system on the Xbox 360, the concept has been transferred to several other social gaming platforms such as Steam, Playstation Network, Kongregate, Battle.net and even Facebook.

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1953: First Score tracking in a pinball

1977: Activision’s Fabric Patches

2007: Valve’s Steam Achievements are introduced

1978: “High Score” term introduced

July 2008: Sony introduces Trophies into PSN

1990: “E-Motion” game introduces Achievements

October 2008: Blizzard introduces Achievements in their best selling game World of Warcraft

2005: Xbox360 launch with improved Xbox Live! Achievements

2010: Apple unveils its social gaming network: Game Center

Fig. 1 A timeline of the evolution of achievements in gaming history

Figure 1 shows a timeline of the evolution of achievements. Badges are nowadays associated by younger people with online gaming but they also have a long history in other fields. In ancient Rome, military heroes were rewarded with medals adorned with the face of Caesar while in recent years Boy Scouts are rewarded with merit badges to show the proficiency acquired in specific skill-sets. Leaderboards, the ancestors of the modern achievement systems, are older than video games themselves. Their creation dates back to the original pinball games of the 1950s, when the makers of pinball games realized that adding a high-score list increased competition, which translated to more time played and more money earned. During the 1970s, when video games began to emerge, leaderboards were quickly adopted into these new games. In 1978 the concept of High Score, as it is known today, which refers to the highest point value reached in the game and stored in the system, made its appearance in Space Invaders; the term was first introduced by Midway’s SeaWolf (Wikipedia 2007); reaching the high score rewarded the player just with extra time, because at that time it was not possible to save the top score. Most of the games released during the 1970s had time limits or simply went on endlessly waiting for the player to run out of resources such as lives, without allowing the players to be identified. This option was introduced later on by games such as Space Invaders II and StarFire and became a huge incentive to keep playing.


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The achievements concept however, has close antecedents in the history of videogames. The Atari 2600 system had already a rewarding system similar to the modern ones in 1977, with physical prizes for the players of the system. According to Atari Age (1998), Activision offered fabric patches to the players that were able to achieve high scores on their games. The manual of these games listed some challenges, such as ending a level in less than 33.3 s; the players were instructed to photograph their TV screen as a proof of having completed the challenge and mail the picture to the company, which would send back a customized patch for that game. Today, these patches have become highly valued collectable items and demonstrate an early example of a game reward in the form of a (physical) ‘patch’, an item expressly conceived to be worn and shown to others, a principle that has been applied also to the distribution of digital patches and is at the base of modern achievement systems. Before the diffusion of the Web and of online gaming, accomplishments could only be shown locally on the player’s console, because the Internet and the existing gaming infrastructure were not able to show results to players on a global scale. Nonetheless, the concept of showing what had been achieved was an important part of the (local) rewarding system. The Amiga game E-Motion (Leamon Amigra 2004) from 1990 was one of the earliest games that incorporated some form of achievements, called a ‘secret bonus’. The game had five secret achievements, for example completing a level without rotating to the right or completely failing certain levels. The transformation of achievement systems into globally distributed systems has to be attributed to the work made by Microsoft. The first initiative in that sense was the MSN Games website (Wikipedia 2006). It offers both free and paid single player and multi-player games and has a number of community enhancing features including badges that players can acquire in some of the games. In 2005, Microsoft launched their new gaming console Xbox 360 with an improved version of their online service called Xbox Live!. It seems that the achievement system initially was not considered a major feature of the Xbox 360 platform, because the player statistics page was only briefly mentioned after all the other components that made the gamer card. Later on, the reception of achievements system within the gaming community was recognised to have commercial impact, providing player retention features that were not planned. Kongregate, an online games hosting website, was released on October 10, 2006 and introduced a metagame point system to track general prestige in all the games, individual challenges and loyalty points for contributing to the site and redeemable in games or with products given by advertising partners. Valve’s Steam digital delivery platform introduced the Steam achievement system with the launch of ‘The Orange Box’ late in 2007. Since then, the achievement system has grown in popularity and Steam now offers a wide selection of games integrated within it. In July 2008, Sony introduced their achievement system into the Playstation 3 gaming console with a system software update under the name of ‘Trophies’.

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In October 2008, Activision Blizzard’s World of Warcraft game launched its own achievement system covering every aspect of gameplay, including world exploration, players versus enemies fights, players versus players fights, professions and character development. Some achievements come with in-game cosmetic rewards such as mounts, tabards, vanity pets and titles. Game Center, originally announced on the April 8, 2010, is an online multiplayer social gaming network released by Apple. It allows users to invite friends to play a game, start a multi-player game through matchmaking, track their achievements and compare their high scores on a leaderboard.

5 Achievements Design Achievements are now so popular in the gaming culture that the reasons for which they have been introduced are often overlooked; however, to make a reward system effective, it is necessary to keep in mind the purpose for which it has been developed. As stated by Björk and Holopainen (2005), ‘Games do not work without incentives for the players to perform actions and to strive toward their goals’, while Juul (2010) claims that ‘Players play for personal goals, are aware of the goals of other players, and the shared understanding of intentionality makes game actions socially meaningful’. Achievements range from simple actions that the player would do anyway, as common gameplay actions, to more difficult challenges even against other players, to a recognition for sharing contents among a community. An achievement is usually defined by four components: • Title: The title is a unique identifier used to suggest a theme or hint the player about the action he is expected to perform. • Icon: The icon is a visual representation of the badge that can be obtained after completing an achievement. An icon is usually an evocative, self-descriptive image that can hint the player on the actions to be performed or be sufficiently attractive to create interest among the other players of a community. The icons for an achievement can appear just after the completion of it or they can come in two different versions: a grayed out version is used when the player has not completed the achievement yet, a coloured version is used when the player has obtained the corresponding badge. • Description: The description is used to describe the conditions that must hold in order for the player to complete an achievement or it may just provide hints about a possible action that can be performed in the game. It may also be used to provide information regarding possible rewards upon the completion of the achievement. • Points: The achievement’s difficulty may be measured through points assigned to the player upon the completion of the related achievement. Accumulated

Achievement Systems Explained Achievement’s Points Achievement’s Icon

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Achievement’s Title Achievement’s Description

Fig. 2 Achievement for the game: gears of war 2 with highlighted components

points can then be used as a measure of the effort or the ability of a specific player by displaying them in his or her player dossier. Not all the achievement system make use of points. Figure 2 shows an example of these components for an achievement of the game ‘Gears of War 2’ (Microsoft Game Studios 2008) in the Xbox Live! Achievement system. Every achievement must also have one or more completion criteria, that can be defined through event-condition-action (ECA) rules (Ceri and Fraternali 1997). The event may be a player action, a system event, the occurrence of a specific condition of the gamestate or a combination of the three that may trigger the achievement completion. The condition is the set of pre-requirements on the present state or on past actions that must hold in order for the completion of the achievement to be attributable. The action is the unlocking of the achievement, which entails the generation of a badge for the user who has completed the achievement and the assignment of digital or real-world rewards. The acquired badges implicitly store valuable user information that can be used for profiling purposes, such as his favourite games and genres, his mastered skills and past gaming history. Achievements allow others to recognise what the player has attained and enhance games by providing lasting rewards. This leads to a sense of affirmation given by the fictional status that the player has created for himself and the expectation that others will look with admiration someone who has undertaken the action stated in the achievement. The gamer score is a synthetic mean for quantifying a player’s skill. While the obtained badges can represent the specific game mechanics that a player has been able to master, the numerical score is an immediate and recognisable indication of the gamer’s experience. The last component needed to a fully operational achievement system is a statistical information dossier about the player. In recent years, games are rarely played in isolation, as players often discuss online their mastery of the game, including any goals they have completed. A detailed dossier of the gaming history of a player, including the game he has played, the badges he

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has obtained, the level he has achieved and his score along with a friendlist and the social gaming groups he is subscribed to is therefore crucial, because it is the feature that enables the social value of the game rewards. The design of achievements in a game is an aspect often overlooked by game designers but is one of the key factor that is needed to motivate a player. In the following, a taxonomy of rewards will be provided along with meaningful guidelines to be followed when designing achievements able to provide satisfying and not alienating experiences.

5.1 Achievements Taxonomy In order to develop a meaningful categorisation, several existing platforms and gaming communities such as Xbox Live!, Playstation Network, Steam, Kongregate and the Facebook’s Achievement System have been taken in consideration with respect to their achievement system features. In particular, the analysis has been carried on six popular games representative of each platform, listed in Table 1 along with an example for each achievement category; even considering the heterogeneity of platforms and genres, the patterns found across the analysed titles were almost identical. In addition to this research, the opinions and preferences of players has been gathered from several online website centered on the topic, such as Xbox360Achievements (2006) and PS3Trohpies (2006). The research has been backed up also with comparisons with the existing literature in-game design, in particular Salen and Zimmerman (2004), Fullerton et al. (2008), Juul (2005) to assure coherence with existing terminology and to group achievements following established game mechanics paradigms. The rest of this Section reports the proposed taxonomy resulting from the described research. • Instructors show to the players the core mechanics of the game and help them to improve their skills. The tasks that this kind of achievements encompass are typically related to actions that need to be mastered in order to proceed with the gaming experience. The benefits that are obtained with Instructors are of two types: the players are able to recognize how they can interact with the system by having a clear stated goal to be accomplished; the players also feel engaged and motivated by the immediate reward provided by the achievement once they have completed the associated tasks, possibly by just trying to explore and discover the game mechanics on their own. In this way they recognize that their actions in the game are something that was expected from them and, as a result, this will improve their engagement and perceived feeling of being able to master the

and sample achievements Heavy rain Team fortress 2 World of warcraft (Blizzard (Sony Computer (Valve Corporation Entertainment 2004) Entertainment 2010) 2007)

Xbox 360 Playstation 3 Steam (PC) PC Completed tutorial level Complete the Use Jarate to reveal Learn how to transform into a on any skill level drawing, Set the a cloaked Spy dragon table, Play with kids Quests Secure the US president Leave home without Win 2Fort with a Get in the arena at the being spotted by shutout Amphitheater of Anguish the journalists and defeat Vladof the Butcher Content Win 5 matches on each See all endings Enter the editor Fully explore the Duskwood discovery Map while watching map a replay Socialisers Win 30 co-op matches N/A Achieve 100,000 Win 1,000 ranked arena with at least 6 YouTube views matches while in a guild gamertags in the for your movie group room Secret chests N/A Find all clues of the Get to Loot Island N/A Origami Killer in and claim your the scene reward! Grinders Get a total of 10,000 Knock down at least Do 1 million points Complete 1000 quests kills 50 passers-by of fire damage

Platform Instructors

Table 1 Table of the analysed games Game title Ghost Recon: advanced warfighter (Ubisoft 2006)

Break The Ice— Automatically Earned Post to news feed and have 3 friends click your message N/A

N/A

52 unique cards collected N/A

(continued)

Earn 600 simoleons from cooking

Complete the quest: Roominating

Location 2 reached

N/A

Facebook Plant something in two empty garden patches

The sims social (EA Games 2011)

Kongregate N/A

Tyrant (Kongregate 2011)

Achievement Systems Explained 33

Climb to the top of the N/A universal leaderboard N/A Give up or fail the Butterfly Trial N/A N/A

Trophies

Loyalties

Red marks

Get 4 kills in 4 s or less Perfect Crime

Herculean task

N/A

N/A

Get a melee kill with a sticky jump N/A

Tyrant (Kongregate 2011) The sims social (EA Games 2011)

Owner of wrath of the Lich king’s collector’s edition

N/A N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

Fish up old crafty in orgrimmar Nexus N/A campaign completed First person on the realm to N/A N/A achieve level 80

Table 1 (continued) Game title Ghost Recon: advanced Heavy rain Team fortress 2 World of warcraft (Blizzard warfighter (Ubisoft (Sony Computer (Valve Corporation Entertainment 2004) 2006) Entertainment 2010) 2007)

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game. As an example consider the game Viva Piñata (Microsoft Game Studios 2006), a life simulation game in which the player is asked to turn a neglected plot of land into a beautiful garden full of strange animals. One of the core mechanics of the game is to grow plants to attract new visitors, for this reason growing five plants to maturity is awarded with the related Instructor Achievement. Example of Instructor Achievement for Viva Piñata

• Quests are awarded for completing significative tasks or when reaching a milestone in the game, such as an important event or the end of a level. Quests provide immediate and continuous rewards to the players because they can be designed for any action in order to maintain the level of engagement high through the whole game. Typically, a Quest is rewarded only the first time that the required conditions are met; if the player performs the same actions again he will not get any recognition. On the other hand, an excessive number of Quests may produce the opposite effect, rendering dull or boring the actions undertaken by the players if they are always rewarded in the same way; thus good balancement and a variety of achievements are required. As an example, consider the game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda Softworks 2011), an action role playing open world video game in which the player explore a fantasy world to find and defeat a Dragon. During the game, the character controlled by the player may get arrested and put into jail. If the player manages to evade, he is awarded with the related Quest Achievement.

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Example of Quest Achievement for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

• Content Discovery are incentives to try all that the game has to offer. They usually require the players to play in a specific game mode, to try specific gaming features or components of the game. This kind of achievements may be used to keep track not only of in-game actions but also of the interactions between the player and the user interface or other special features that have to be emphasised. As an example, consider the game The Simpsons Game (Electronic Arts 2007), an action/platformer video game based on the animated television series The Simpsons. The game is most known for having the easiest achievement ever designed, which requires just to press the start button in the main menu to award the player with an achievement of this category. Example of Content Discovery Achievement for The Simpsons Game


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• Socializers reward the interaction among players and their contributions to enhance the experience offered by a platform or a game. Examples include achievements for making custom content, for reaching the maximum number of players in a game or on a server, for giving items to another player and for assisting another player through a level. They are typical of multi-player scenarios or in games in which a strong and committed community has been created; the interaction loops enforced by Socializers encourage emergent behaviors that improve the game longevity and are typically used for open world games in which players may have to set their own goals. Socializers can also promote viral play, especially at the debut of a new title. As an example, consider the game NBA Live 07 (Electronic Sports 2006), a sports games on basketball. The developers chose to exploit the motivational factors of the Xbox Live! achievement system to encourage people to play online. An achievement is given to any player that finds himself playing online while a number of other players are connected at the same time. Example of Socializer Achievement for NBA Live 07

• Secret Chests are awarded for finding hidden items, special areas, completing collections and other similar features. They encourage the player to explore every facet of the game and they are usually related to actions that are not meaningful for the goals of the game but can create surprise or excitement, leading to discussions with other players on how to reach a secret area or on how to obtain a special item. As an example, consider the game Halo 3 (Microsoft Game Studios 2007), a first person shooter video game. During the exploration of the game world, the player may find special skulls hidden in places difficult to reach. Finding one of these skulls awards the player with a special achievement, some gameplay improvements and special armor sets.

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Example of Secret Chest Achievement for Halo 3

• Grinders are a type of achievement in which the task is to perform the same action repeatedly, with little or no variance between each repetition, such as reaching ‘1000 kills’ or earning ‘100,000 gold’. In theory, they are used to encourage deep exploration into modes or certain game mechanics but in practice they are often abused. Achievements belonging to this category are easy to be designed but they can disrupt the game experience for some players. The actions required to fulfill the achievement’s condition can be considered well designed only if they overlap with something that the player would naturally do anyway during the gameplay.If completing a specific task in the game would be considered as a normal behavior even without an achievement attached to it, then an achievement can be designed around it, otherwise this means that the achievement is forcing a player to change his behavior, possibly leading to a less entertaining experience for him. As an example, consider the game Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega 2007), a classical platform game. During the exploration of the levels in the game, the player may collect golden rings that are used to show the right path to follow and to protect the player from the first wound they may suffer. Collecting 100 rings without being hurt by any enemy reward the player with an extra ‘life’ and awards the related Grinder achievement.


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Example of Grinder Achievement for Sonic the Hedgehog

• Herculean Tasks are rewarded when a player is able to perform exceptional actions within the game. This category of achievements may include difficult, non-repetitive tasks requiring a good knowledge of the game mechanics, mastering of the needed skills or a huge effort in terms of time and concentration that only few committed players will be able to mantain. As an example, consider the game Dead Rising (Capcom 2006), an actionadventure survival horror video game. One of the achievements proposed in the game requires the player to defend himself from hordes of zombies with limited food and weapon supply for 7 game days, which equals to at least 14 real life hours in a row without the possibility to interrupt the gaming session. This particular achievement is considered as one of the most difficult achievement ever designed. Example of Herculean Task Achievement for Dead Rising

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• Trophies are unique achievements that can be acquired just by few players in the world for exceptional actions performed in the game, possibly negating the possibility for any other player to acquire them. Trophies are associated to tasks or actions in online games that contain strong multi-player components. The purpose of trophies is to engage the players in fierce competitions in order to be the first to obtain the limited reward thus increasing player retention, engagement and social interaction. Examples of Trophies may include being the top player on a permanent leaderboard or winning an online tournament. As an example, consider the game Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (Ubisoft 2006), a tactical first person shooter. In the game, players command their team of soldiers while neutralizing hostile forces and completing various mission objectives. Featuring strong multi-player components for competitive online matches, one of the achievements of the game requires the player to be on the top of the universal leaderboard, actually recognizing him as the best player in the world. Not every player can reach the top of the leaderboard and so just a small percentage of all the owners of the game were able to obtain this achievement. Example of Trophy Achievement for Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter

• Red Marks are assigned to players that performs poorly or commit negative actions in the game, such as losing or being humiliated. They do not usually award a player with more points because they are extremely easy to be obtained and players that want to maintain a certain reputation are avoiding them to not be considered incompetent.


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As an example, consider the game F.E.A.R. 2 (WB Games 2009) a psychological horror first person shooter. The player assumes the role of a special force soldier that must uncover the secrets of a paranormal menace in the form of a little girl. As in all first person shooters, during the gameplay the character controlled by the player may be killed, even as a consequence of his own mistakes. If the player kills himself in the game five times, he is ‘rewarded’ with a special achievement remarking this fact. Example of Red Mark Achievement for F.E.A.R. 2

• Loyalties are special achievements that are used to reward the loyalty of the core members of a community. They can be given if a player participates to a realworld event like a convention or buys special editions of the game. Considering the difficulty to perform such real-world actions, these achievements are extremely valuable and are taken into great consideration by the members of an online community. As an example, consider the game Diablo 3 (Blizzard Entertainment 2012), an action role playing video game. The fastest selling PC game to date, the game features two different edition, a standard edition and a limited numbered collector’s edition. Players who bought the collector’s edition of the game were provided with physical and digital objects and were rewarded in-game with a special unique achievement for having registered the numbered copy. Considered the limited quantity and the demand of such version of the game, only few players has been able to obtain this particular achievement.

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Example of Loyalty Achievement for Diablo 3

5.2 Achievements Design Guidelines In the following, we present some guidelines on achievements design based on the best practices provided by Greg McClanahan, achievement designer at Kongregate, in McClanahan (2009) and tailored on the taxonomy of Section V.A along with the comments and preferences of users stated in the aforementioned forums; they can be used to avoid designing achievements that are not appealing for the players or that are not meaningful for the gaming experience. • A player is motivated by the need of completing all the achievements that the game has to offer, thus he will always try to use the most efficient method to earn them. An achievement has to be designed by evaluating this strategy to avoid creating a repetitive and alienating task. • If several achievements have been designed to reward ending the game at different difficulty levels, it is good practice to acknowledge the highest difficulty at which something has been accomplished, plus all the implied easier achievements. • Achievements should always be earnable without compromising the game progression; a player should not be forced to restart the entire game from the beginning just because he has missed an achievement. • Achievements hints must be findable; players must be able to get know that the game contains secret features or side quests and be accompanied in their exploration of the gameplay to get to them.


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• Unlikely, situations that can happen during the gameplay should be rewarded with a special badge in order for the player to remember the moment. These tasks have not to be random or too difficult to be obtained, otherwise committed players will just spend hours trying to achieve that particular result. • It is better to avoid designing achievements that reward getting the highest ranking among a too large group of people, reaching a top spot on some leaderboard or winning a tournament. Only few selected or committed players will be able to obtain them, while the others will feel like they will not be able to complete the game with the risk of abandoning it. • It is better to avoid designing ‘hidden’ achievements that do not state in a clear way which tasks the player has to perform: achievements are well-stated goals that the player has to reach, if the tasks are not given the player will just obtain an achievement by chance. • Awarding badges upon failures, such as losing a certain number of matches or suffering a brutal death, has to be avoided. Players are not satisfied when losing or being considered low skilled; remarking this fact in their gaming history may have a negative effect. • Grinders should fit with an action that the player would naturally do anyway. If completing a specific task in the game would be considered as a normal behavior even without an achievement attached to it, then an achievement can be designed around it. Otherwise the achievement forces a player to change his behavior, which goes against the principle that an achievement should contribute to a better experience for the player.

6 Open Achievement Framework In this section, we propose a platform-independent architectural model for the development of an achievement system. We started by reviewing several existing platforms and gaming communities, such as Xbox Live!, Playstation Network, Steam, Kongregate, the Facebook’s Achievement System and then by abstracting their features into a conceptual representation that could serve as a reference to reconcile the differences among heterogeneous implementations, e.g. for the purpose of player data portability across different games, and as a blueprint for future interoperable achievement system designs. The model of the achievement system is a component of the more general architecture model for games; as a reference, we have adopted the game architecture model illustrated in Fig. 3, which is a simplified version of the model introduced in Gregory et al. (2009). The Gameplay Foundations sub-system includes components of the game engine used to implement the game mechanics and logic of a game. The Front End represents the interface for the players. The architecture is completed with GameSpecific Subsystems, which embody functionalities that depend on the specific game, and with the Online Multi-player Management sub-system, which, if present, controls the synchronization of multi-player games. The player interacts

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Fig. 3 Gaming architecture with achievement system component

with the Game-Specific subsystem, thus modifying the internal status of the game; he can also interact with the Front End by navigating menus and requesting information regarding his gaming history. In this model, the Achievement System is a cross-cutting module connected with all the other main sub-systems. Its goal is to receive Gameplay Events from a running game played by a specific user, process them and return as output the updated gaming history data for that player, including the badges he may have acquired and an updated profile. Gameplay Events represent the occurrence of meaningful game states, for instance reaching a specified number of collected objects during a gameplay session. Once the requirements for the completion of an achievement are reached, the achievement system signals the change to the Game-Specific Flow System and to the High Level Game. Flow System of the engine if there are consequences within the gameplay such as rewarding a player with an in-game item. The signal is also sent to the Front End, to inform the user about the reward he has obtained and about his new gaming history report and to the Online Multiplayer Management components, if present, in order to enhance the interaction by pairing players with same skills together, encouraging contacts from people with the same tastes and other social features. The Achievement System is structured into the components and data flows shown in Fig. 4: the Action Detection module filters raw events and returns only the meaningful achievement actions. The Action Detection performs the filtering and composition of the events through the use of Achievement Action Patterns, i.e. expressions defined by the game developer denoting the sequence of events that trigger the notification of an action meaningful for the unlocking of the achievement. Achievement actions patterns can be simple predicates selecting events of a


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Fig. 4 Architectural model for an achievement system

specific type, e.g. ‘Level Completion’, or more complex expressions, that detect an action based on a sequence of gameplay events, such as ‘Find the key, open the chest and return the crown to the King’. Achievement actions are processed by a GameStat Updater Module, which tracks and persists the monitored actions as Gameplay Statistics. Achievement actions and player statistics are the input to the Achievement Detector, which checks if the required conditions for a particular achievement, defined through Achievement Descriptors, are met, assigns the associated badge to the player and outputs the updated profile data regarding him. The Achievement Detector can be implemented by exploiting the event-driven architecture of an Active Database (Ceri and Fraternali 1997). The Achievement Descriptors represent the Event-Condition-Action rules of the active database under the form of triggers used to define the requirements of an achievement. The event part specifies which achievement action triggers the invocation of the rule, the condition part specifies the logical predicate that defines the pre-condition for granting the achievement and the action part represents the generation of the badge associated to the achievement and the update of the player statistics. Figure 5 illustrates a possible schema of the database supporting game data persistence. Game is the core entity: the Mode attribute represents the gameplay modes (Single Player, Multi-Player, Cooperative), while the Genre attribute identifies its genre (e.g., Puzzle, Educational). An Achievement has an Icon, which describes it in a visual way, a Category that specifies the task (Instructor, Grinder), an attribute PointsGiven, which contains the amount of points to be granted and a Boolean attribute OfTheDay defining whether the achievement has to be completed on a specific day in order to obtain virtual goods, more points or increased levels.The Player entity accommodates game-specific personal and social features. Avatar and Nickname allow the user to be recognizable by using a custom image or a

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Fig. 5 UML class diagram for an achievement system

unique fictional name, while Motto, Biography and GamingRig convey customization. To enable social interactions, attributes like Friends and Fans keep track of the players the user likes to play with and the players that appreciate the user’s performance, while the Status attribute denotes if the player is online, offline, occupied or the game he is playing. Reputation in online gaming communities is fundamental and distinctive feature of any player; being able to recognize wheter a player is bad mannered, prone to cheating, unpleasant to play with is of utterly importance to assure a satisfying gaming experience for the user of an entertainment platform; it is usually measured as an integer number ranging from 0 to 5. ScreenShot and Videos show salient moments worth sharing with the community. A player can also choose his FavouriteGame. The model describes also the game-relevant statistics: the Level represents the proficiency and the experience of a player, by aggregating in a compact way such indicators as points gathered, hours spent playing or particularly difficult tasks completed. The Points attribute stores all the points that have been achieved in all the games. ObtainedBadges represent the achievements that have been unlocked. PlayerTitle is a special recognition given to the player for his actions, like a chivalry role, while the PlayerType (e.g. Achievers, Explorers, etc.) associates the


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player with a particular behavioral category among the ones detailed by Richard Bartler in his article about player types in Bartle et al. (1996). A GameBadge relates a Player with the Achievement he has obtained. The CompletionPercentage field shows how much the player has already achieved in a specific task. StartDate and EndDate record the dates in which the player has started to work on the achievement’s goals and the date in which he has obtained it. The TrialsN attribute tracks how many times the user tried to fulfill the achievement. The GameStats relationship denotes the meaningful statistics that the developer has designed for a game, for example the HoursPlayed by a Player or the Score he has obtained. Finally, a GamePlayAction, associated with a specific Gameplay of a player, records the StartDate and EndDate of the gaming session and the actual actions performed by the player on that specific time frame and the Role defines which are the allowed actions in the game for the role associated to a player.

7 Achievements as Part of Cubrik’s Gaming Framework The architecture and models that have been described, along with the guidelines related to the design of achievements, are at the core of a Gaming Framework used to leverage entertainment capabilities to increase player retention and participation in a novel human computation platform under the name of CUbRIK (The CUbRIK Project 2011). The aim of the CUbRIK project is to develop a modular framework and distributed system architecture for flexible design and implementation of multimedia search applications allowing easy reuse of existing components and multimedia processing workflow, their extension with domain-specific elements and the incorporation of human computation for tasks requiring human intelligence in the solution process. Traditional multimedia search engines are still not able to leverage the full potential of the entertainment capabilities offered by the technological advancement to drive the increased amount of users that are willing to work to improve the results of their search. With the increased need of human contribution to tailor and improve search results and provided media content, new paradigms able to encourage and reward the improvements brought by the users are needed. The CUbRIK project aims at exploiting Games with A Purpose (GWAPs), digital games where players generate useful data as a by-product of play. GWAPs are usually applied to tasks where the problem to solve is out of the reach of traditional machine learning algorithms, such as common sense elicitation and content tagging for multimedia search, thanks to the fact that humans have superior capacity for understanding complex content. In this way, it is possible to selectively replace or correct the output of automatic content processing systems with human-produced knowledge.

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One major issue of this kind of applications derives from the fact that the games are designed and tailored over the specific task that has to be solved on ad-hoc basis. This can lead to an experience that may still perceived by the users as work and not as entertaining as other interactive media applications that follows established game design patterns and incentives for the players. For these reasons, it is necessary to investigate the design of game mechanics and motivation techniques in games in order to solve human computation tasks and define a methodology for the assignment of human computation tasks to the right players based on their profile information and past history. These problems are addressed in CUbRIK with the use of a Gaming Framework that provides a set of tools and guidelines that can ease the development of novel engaging applications able to exploit human contributors. In particular, an achievement system is under development as a component of the Reward System of the Gaming Framework. The Reward System is designed to increase the participation and engagement of CUbRIK’s users with the use of incentive mechanisms already well established for games and gamified applications. The Reward system, besides its motivational features, allows also to gather the expertise of players in a formalized and persistent way and render it explicitly available for assigning tasks to the most suited users.

8 Conclusions In this chapter, we have discussed the notion of achievement in games, from both a design and an architectural perspective. Achievements are becoming a vital component of modern distributed games, which calls for efforts in standardizing the data model and the architecture for their support, so to enable interoperability of achievements across multiple gaming platforms. The illustrated architecture and model are at the base of the CuBRIK Project (The CUbRIK Project 2011), which is building a human computation platform for addressing content enrichment and multimedia processing tasks with crowdsourcing. The focus of work is on mixing heterogeneous approaches for the engagement of the crowd: Games With a Purpose, question & answering on social networks and specialized crowdsourcing markets, like Amazon Mechanical Turk. Presently, the data model and achievement systems are under implementation to support a draw and guess game scenario, where players are segmenting images that specialized feature recognition algorithms were not able to process. Furthermore, the achievement system data model and architecture are being applied to an enterprise scenario, in which an IT company wishes to introduce gamification in the development activities of its developer community. Both the aforementioned efforts will take advantage of a platform-independent architecture and data model, in terms of reusability of the system modules and of the interoperability with novel achievement system standards that may emerge in the future.


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Acknowledgments This work is partially sponsored by the BPM4People project (www. bpm4people.org), funded by the research for SMEs Program of the Research Executive Agency of the EC. This work is also supported by the CUbRIK Project, partially funded by the EC 7th Framework ICT Programme for Research and Technological Development, under Grant agreement no 287704.

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